Welcome to Stanford, Cal and SMU. It isn’t a great solution but it was the best remaining option and I am glad the ACC took it.
Want to talk about scheduling a bit. With 18 schools for basketball, the ACC finally gets away from that odd number of schools and the problem of 1 ACC team having the weekind off each week during conference play. That is nice. Probably will keep the existing scheduling model and go from 20 to 22 basketball games in conference. Bad news for schools that like to play at Syracuse OOC to make some coin.
For football, there are of course 17 schools in the league. The easiest option seems to be to have 2 rivals each team plays every year. That leaves 14 other schools. Play 7 one year and the other the next year.
This brings the ACC to 9 conference games, which is controversial. But it is by far the best way to retain key rivalries and play everyone regularly. My guess is that all the conferences end up having to do this and college football expands to a 13 game regular season to allow some cupcake games against FCS teams and retention of traditional annual OOC games.
The B1G didn’t do this, which given how incompetent they have been at making decisions, makes me confident this is the way to go.
The ACC could also go with 4 annual rivals and then rotate through the 12 schools not played annually by playing 4 each year. So you play everyone in the conference at least once every 3 years.
That solution only requires 8 conference games a year and will probably by chosen based on that. But no one is going to want to be a rival for Stanford, Cal and SMU except for Stanford, Cal and SMU.